High Noon For the Neocons´ Global Village

Director Fred Zinnemann, an Austrian Jew, saw himself as steering the film toward a message movie about European failure to fight fascism until it was too late. Zinneman’s vision is ultimately the one that prevails. — Kyle Smith

Sonny is maybe more right than he´d like to be that High Noon is a neoconservative allegory — insofar as neoconservatism as we know it only makes sense as a global project and High Noon is a story about a town. Faulkner wanted to see the world in a grain of sand, so it´s only natural that an anti-fascist cautionary tale about letting globe-hungry aggression spiral out of control be framed for artistic purposes as an oater showdown in a theatrical crucible. But even that story´s about Europe taking good care of itself — if one had paleo tendencies, one would say it was a tale about why the US should never have had to jump into a war that Europe never should have let happen (especially after America bailed out the West the first time around).

There´s trouble, any way you slice it, in the contention that the moral duties of political action that exist in a Wild West village are basically interchangeable with those that exist in the international state system. The neoconservative contention is that this is truly troublesome but also actually true, and that the alternatives are even more trouble some. That contention might be true, especially if a strong bloc of states purporting to represent or be the international community agrees that it´s true. But to the extent that such a bloc doesn´t exist, the alternatives to the High Noon road might actually be less troublesome, at least in the short term. So the neocon argument has to grow more complicated: either the long-term possibilities must be too dreadful to risk, or the short-term possibilities are actually much more worrisome. Once again, sometimes the facts seem to pan out, but sometimes the crystal-ball-gazing isn´t of as much use as it was to, say, Churchill in 1936, after the Rhineland had been reoccupied. This is not my way of obscuring a clear answer about whether we should worry about Iran´s nuclear program. We should. The question is whether prudence dictates restraint. That´s not an easy question to answer, because international relations, as a matter of structure, ain´t High Noon.

Perhaps the final problem for neocons, however, is optimizing the size of their gunslinging posse. Note there was no coalition of the willing in High Noon. If there were, the film would have no doubt taken on the slightly uncomfortable valences of gangsterism that make Tombstone so gripping. But neocons are no fools when it comes to the collective action problems associated with too many cooks in the interventionist kitchen. There´s an inherent tension between unilateralism and interventionism, and the peak of that tension is a dead reckoning for neoconservatives´ strange version of the global village.